A high seas approach to offshoring

A new type of offshoring may be emerging. It's literally offshore, just not by much. Three miles, in fact. In a boat, off the shores near Los Angeles.

The company that provides this model, SeaCode, calls it "a ship-based engineering facility." The way it works is that programmers spend 4-month shifts at sea, living on the boat, with room and board provided, in exchange for pay that is considerably higher than what they would earn working in a more traditional offshoring location, such as India.

But, for SeaCode customers, the company claims, the cost will still be less than what they would pay for programmers landlocked in the U.S.

And the company insists that its model will help the economy here in the States. From SeaCode's Web site:

With Hybrid-Sourcing SeaCode brings already offshored jobs back to the U.S. and assures that 90 cents of every dollar from our clients stays in the U.S. instead of flowing to foreign locations.

Another issue sure to sail into the hyrbid horizon is that the programmers-at-sea won't need H1B visas, an already controversial but increasingly contentious issue among the IT masses, that my colleague editor at large Eprhaim Schwartz has addressed in his columns, Green card regulations encourage offshoring and The H1B visa issue revisited, and will continue to track into the future.

Whether SeaCode sinks or swims, the new company has spurred some headlines, my personal favorite being Forbes' C++ faring lads. Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe also wrote about SeaCode.